Invasion | Box Set | Books 1-7

by Platt, Sean

  In the seconds before they’d lost the feeds, it had looked like the suicide plane wouldn’t be able to bank hard enough to strike the Apex and would instead slam into the mansion.

  Where Meyer Dempsey lived. With Piper.

  “Hang on. I can hear him.”

  “Franklin?” said Benjamin.

  “No. The deejay on Q106.4.” Danika was sitting sideways in one of the coffee room’s wooden chairs around its chipped wooden table, wearing an unflattering gray hoodie with her brown ponytail wagging behind her. She was in her thirties but had a college girl’s posture and temperament. She’d worked for Benjamin as a researcher for over a decade. After Piper left in the mothership, Cameron had developed a brief crush on her, too.

  “Shh.”

  “Holy shit, Ivan. The suspense is killing us.”

  “Shut up, Danika.”

  “Wait.” Something had caught Cameron’s eye. A blinking light.

  “Almost got it.” Ivan used one hand to press the headset to his ear, the other to turn a dial.

  “Something’s going on over here.” Cameron approached the network interface area in the corner (the place where sugar, coffee creamers, and stir sticks were kept) and knelt below the desk. Nearby, Ivan hit keys on the open laptop’s keyboard and scribbled his finger across the touch screen.

  “If you people don’t shut up …”

  “Ivan. Do I need to reset the router or anything? Is it like normal Internet?”

  “Power cycle,” Ivan said impatiently, pressing both hands to his headphones to muffle the noise.

  “He means to turn it off and on,” Benjamin translated.

  Cameron unplugged the device, plugged it back in, then waited. Green lights climbed its front. A page reloaded onscreen, and Cameron found himself looking at an image of an immature but populous city made of mostly perfect lines: simple houses and a few larger, impressive structures. The camera was high up. Near the middle there was …

  “Guys. Look at this.”

  “Quiet, Cameron!” Ivan hissed.

  “Okay, Ivan,” Danika said. “You keep listening. We’ll look at the video showing us exactly what we want to know.”

  Ivan turned. Charlie, Benjamin, Danika, and eventually Ivan clustered behind Cameron, now operating the small computer from his knees on the floor.

  “The Internet’s back?”

  “No,” Danika said. “I made this image in Photoshop.”

  “Standard communications blackout,” Ivan said. “They cut us off during the attack, but—”

  “Oh, shut up, Ivan.”

  Benjamin pointed at a round thing near the unharmed mansion (near the predictably unharmed blue pyramid) that seemed almost superimposed on the monitor. It looked like something burning inside a transparent glass sphere, hovering maybe fifty or a hundred feet in the air.

  “What’s that?” Benjamin asked.

  Ivan zoomed in on what looked like twisted, blackened metal sitting on the enormous sphere’s bottom.

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “It has to be the bomber.”

  “What did it hit?”

  “I don’t think it hit anything. They must’ve surrounded it with a force field or something.”

  “But the shuttles …” Benjamin began.

  “We’re clearly not entirely capable of understanding the complete defensive abilities of a race that is able to travel through space and occupy a planet,” Charlie said as if reading from an instruction manual.

  “It was worth a shot,” Ivan said, as if that shot hadn’t just resulted in maybe fifteen or twenty deaths. The bomber’s pilot hadn’t taken that shot. It was also the fighter pilots and the people who’d fired Ivan’s modified rockets from mobile launchers nestled in the nearby hills. All the people Charlie had argued would pointlessly die, seeing as it would take more than a simple, guard-drawing distraction to launch a suicide attack on one of the occupation’s nine global capitals. But Ivan was a strategist first and a human second. The decision had been reduced to a simple equation: the probability that an attack on the city (instead of the mothership) would be successful versus a handful of soldiers’ lives. A cold thought, but if it worked, Ivan would have been saying I told you so, then toasting to the first chink in the Astrals’ armor.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Charlie said.

  “It’s made of glass, Charlie.” Ivan jabbed a finger at the gigantic blue pyramid dominating the city shot on the laptop’s screen. “It wasn’t unreasonable to think we could break something made of glass.”

  “First of all,” said Charlie, raising a finger as if preparing to tick off points of a forthcoming argument, “you’re assuming it’s made of glass. But what you don’t understand because you haven’t spent your life studying extraterrestrial visitation — or cultural and genetic interference — is that there’s no evidence of anything as fragile as glass being used in monolithic constructions in the past, and—”

  “This isn’t the past,” Ivan snapped.

  “And,” Charlie said, raising his voice in a rare display of emotion, knowing Ivan didn’t have a leg to stand on and eager to prove it, “given that their first monoliths this time were stone, simple logic assures us that if they’re not using stone now, it’s in favor of something stronger and more permanent, not less, and that despite what you may think, the pretty blue look of the Apex structure doesn’t mean it’s actually just an Apple Store, but is something important and not fragile.”

  “You can’t assume—”

  “Thirdly,” Charlie interrupted, ticking off a third point on his raised fingers, “you insist on giving them less credit than you’d give any human enemy. If the Apex is the site we think it is, and if it’s as important as we believe it to be, why would they leave it unguarded?”

  “Because they’d be chasing shuttles!”

  “Oh, come on, Ivan,” Danika said. “If you were defending your own flag, would you let the other team wave their arms to distract you, then send everyone after them and leave your base unguarded?”

  “It’s easy to second-guess now.” Ivan crossed his arms. “But I’m the only one willing to—”

  “Okay, okay,” said Benjamin, straightening and raising his arms for order. “Mistakes have been made by all of us. As a team, because no matter whose idea this was—” He looked at Ivan. “—we all agreed to it.” He glared at Danika and Charlie in turn. “Like Ivan said, it was worth a shot.”

  Benjamin sighed, possibly feeling the weight of those many deaths partially upon his shoulders. If this had worked, those deaths would have had meaning despite their sadness. But it hadn’t, and now the loss was so terribly worthless.

  After a moment, Cameron said, “Do you still think the Apex is important?”

  Benjamin seemed like he might waffle, so Charlie said, “Yes.”

  Cameron looked over at the shaggy-bearded man.

  “From the moment we saw they were interested in Vail,” Charlie said, again finding a coatrack’s emotion, “there was something that bugged us.” He looked at Benjamin meaningfully. His eyes ticked briefly toward Danika. Then he added, “All of us.”

  “‘What makes Vail so special?’” Cameron recited what might as well have been the lab’s slogan for the last two and a half years.

  “The other nine capitals all have something obviously alien about them,” Benjamin said. “All but Vail. There are pyramids, old cities, temples made of massive stones … but Vail has nothing at all that we know of. And the more research I do — the more we compare notes with our colleagues around the world — the more I worry that Vail might be special because it’s the resting place of something powerful, left behind from all their past visits. Something they don’t take when they leave, but that they need to access each time they return in order to force a—” He made an uncertain gesture. “—a reset, I guess.”

  “What kind of thing?” Cameron asked.

  “There are a few ways it’s been described, both directly and in
directly,” Benjamin said. “I call it Thor’s Hammer.”

  Chapter Five

  Sometime after the commotion died down and her father assured everyone that the threat of danger was an exaggeration, Lila caught a glimpse of motion outside her window. She stood and walked over in time to see two of the round silver shuttles flank the now-mostly extinguished sphere of fire and tether it with energy beams. Moving much more slowly than shuttles normally moved, as if afraid to drop the thing, the ships towed the big plane’s remains inside its capsule. Where they’d dispose of the behemoth, Lila didn’t know or care. Probably in the outlands, beyond the city perimeter.

  After the ships were gone, Lila watched the sky. Once upon a time, the air had been filled with vapor trails from commercial airliners. Then for a while, there had been motherships and shuttles. Now there were both. Aliens had colonized the globe, but that didn’t mean people had stopped needing to travel. It was almost possible to believe this was all the new normal.

  Lila’s eyes flitted to trees and mountains. Rifts of smoke in the distance had gone, but she still didn’t like to be here, in her room on the second floor of this large civilian target. She’d also never really grown comfortable here in general: below her father, at the head of the occupation’s human wing. Dad said the Astrals had good intentions despite all that had happened, and that mankind’s insistence on violence had made bloodshed necessary. Everyone would understand in time, he insisted, and see that this had all been for the best.

  But Lila had her doubts. Even though she merely lived in the giant house near the heart of a North American capital, she still felt like her life was lived on the wrong side. Cameron was out there somewhere, and Piper would have been with him if the mothership hadn’t brought her home. Cameron was against all of this, and Piper would have been, too. Maybe she was anyway. Lila had heard Piper and her father fighting plenty, always making up inevitably. And like Lila, Piper’s love of the viceroy seemed to go hand-in-hand with fear of his changes.

  Lila sighed, turning away. She tried to settle her wandering thoughts. The strike had unnerved her. Rebels had attacked many times in the past but hadn’t bothered for years. Black Monday’s assault had silenced mostly everyone. But earlier rebel attacks had focused on the ships, and this was the first to feel personal. Now it seemed like they were after Lila’s family — traitors that they were.

  The door opened. A familiar face peeked through the gap.

  “Can I come in?” Christopher asked.

  Lila heard his actual question: Is Raj in there?

  It wasn’t the kind of thing he could ask outright because if Raj was there, he’d easily read Christopher’s subtext. And while Lila was pretty sure Raj assumed Lila was habitually unfaithful (he wasn’t stupid, after all), he didn’t know for sure, and didn’t know the culprit was Christopher. She’d deflected that idea before they’d moved here, when she’d allied with Raj and complained about their old bunker mate. But so much had changed since then. Mostly Raj.

  “Yeah, come on in.”

  Christopher pushed the door open but hesitated at the threshold. Lila’s room was enormous, like all the mansion’s many bedrooms. She had rooms within rooms — an enormous suite easily as large as the starter house she’d one day dreamed of having with Raj, back when he’d been the sweet, shy boy she’d fallen in love with.

  “Come in,” Lila repeated, now beckoning.

  “What about Clara?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “Asleep? I thought she was done taking naps.” Christopher came inside, careful to leave the door ajar. The only thing worse than Raj walking in to find Christopher in Lila’s room would be Raj walking in to find Christopher in Lila’s room with the door closed for privacy. It seemed likely, in a Raj/Christopher conflict, that Meyer would take Lila’s wishes into consideration, but it wasn’t worth the risk if they could avoid it. Ironically, their new life was like their old one in that Meyer’s public image was everything. If there were magazines, Meyer Dempsey would still grace their covers. And to Meyer and his public image, his granddaughter’s father probably belonged in the picture more than the captain of the unnecessary human guards. If it came down to choosing, Lila was sure Christopher would find himself out of a job at best. She didn’t want to consider the less appealing possibilities.

  “She got really tired after the recent … excitement,” Lila said.

  “She saw it happen? You didn’t take her into the basement?”

  “She doesn’t need to see things to get excited about them, Chris.”

  Christopher bobbed his head as if to indicate a fair point. But he didn’t like to discuss Clara’s differences from a normal child any more than Lila, and they seemed to have mutually decided to ignore the topic and hope it would go away. Only Meyer treated Clara as truly special, but it was because of her pedigree as new royalty, not anything more troubling.

  Christopher sat in Lila’s chair. She sat on the bed, squeaking the springs.

  Christopher glanced through the open door, into the hallway.

  “Where is Raj anyway?”

  “I think he’s up on the fourth floor, in the network center. He wanted to go off with Trevor to talk to the cops, but Dad said that’s more your job, and that Trevor could handle it fine on his own. That went over well, seeing as Raj technically outranks you in the guard.”

  “He’s gotta see it wasn’t really necessary to send him on an errand like that.”

  “Is anything my dad gives Raj to do necessary?”

  “Fourth floor, huh?” Christopher looked up, knowing that only a staircase separated Raj from his cheating wife. “How long will he be gone, and how well do you think they can hear up there?” Christopher looked down at the bed.

  Lila smiled, despite knowing Christopher wasn’t joking, even though he should have been with Raj so close. “Not today. I’m beat up.”

  “Maybe I can help you relax.”

  “Not today.” She reached out to soften the rebuke and briefly held Christopher’s hand.

  “So. Trevor,” said Christopher. “Stepping up as the big man.”

  “Like father, like son. He’ll be declaring himself lieutenant viceroy if I don’t keep him in line.”

  “Is there such a thing?”

  Lila rolled her eyes, giving Christopher an I could give a shit look.

  “They told us to tighten security around the house, too,” said Christopher. “But not how to tighten things up — probably because we’re not the security force that actually makes any difference. But … the police? What, they’re going to add beat cops to keep F-14s from attacking again?”

  Lila had no idea whether those had been F-14s or if Christopher was talking out of his ass. She decided not to ask herself how the rebellion had secured F-14s or anything like them, or what other aces they might still have in their deck.

  “I think they’re increasing the number of peacekeepers. Not just cops.”

  “You mean Reptars?”

  “What else would I mean?”

  Christopher looked like he wanted to slide beside Lila. Instead, he glanced at the door and stayed where he was.

  “I just don’t buy that name. Peacekeepers. They’re more like animals. Dangerous animals.”

  “I think that’s the point,” Lila said.

  “That the city is patrolled by animals?”

  “That they’re dangerous.”

  Christopher sighed then picked at his black uniform pants leg, looking out the window. Lila could see the Apex’s transparent blue form beyond him, the pyramid’s partially finished side eclipsing the window’s left quarter.

  “Oh, just ask what you’re here to ask, Chris.”

  “I’m here to see you.”

  “And we’re going to sit like diplomats. Sounds like a fun date.”

  “Wanna go to the coffee shop?”

  Lila almost laughed. It was such a normal, average, ordinary thing to say. Problem was, these had stopped being normal, average, ordinary d
ays a long time ago. To Meyer, the reestablishment of human trade, commerce, and global communication made perfect sense because he kept saying the Astrals were here to understand and observe humanity — to help it improve as a species. But Lila, to whom that sounded like the thickest of bullshit, thought the idea of grabbing a coffee in a city watched over by an alien mothership and patrolled by alien animals was like singing in sinking lifeboats. Her odd sense of prescience had departed with Clara’s birth, but she couldn’t shake a strong mental image of cows fattened for slaughter, or masses kept dumb by social opiates. Getting coffee under the eye of Reptar peacekeepers didn’t feel any different to Lila than joining one of the new religious orders and lending help to build their absurd effigies in the wasteland.

  “I want you to tell me what’s on your mind,” she said.

  “What makes you think I have some evil intention in being here?”

  “Because you always have evil intentions.”

  “Like how I shot my way into your house just to get into your pants?”

  Lila snorted laughter and covered her mouth, big eyes darting to the hall.

  “Okay, fine,” he said, shifting in the chair. “The guys are bugging me for information.”

  “And by guys, you mean Terrence.”

  “Mainly Terrence.”

  “And he wants to know … what, exactly?”

  “Trevor said your dad said something about digging.”

  “Digging? I don’t know anything about digging.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Why does Terrence want to know?”

  “You know how Terrence is,” Christopher said. “He’s curious.”

  Lila raised an eyebrow. “Why is he always so curious?”

  “He just is.”

  Lila turned her hands over, palms up. “Well, I don’t know anything about digging. Tell Terrence to ask Trevor.”

  “He did. That’s all Trevor knew.”

  “Then he can ask my dad.”

  Christopher looked at Lila as if to say, Touché. Maybe what Terrence wanted to know was for public consumption and maybe he was being nosy, but Christopher’s look now told Lila that he didn’t particularly want the viceroy to know he was curious.